Reviewed:

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Douglas Hyde Gallery until January 29th

Fionnuala Ni Chiosain, Kerlin Gallery until January 8th

Paper Works, National Photographic Archive until January 10th

The centrepiece of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres exhibition at the Douglas Hyde is one of the artist's light works, an enormous grid of low-wattage bulbs that seems to pour onto the ground and splash out like a waterfall: a cascade of light. It is both visually lush and unapologetically austere in its formal vocabulary. Like a lot of his work, while it invites symbolic interpretation, it is also curiously detached and neutral in its endless ambiguity.

In fact, the late Gonzalez-Torres, Cuban-born, New York-based, straddled the divide between the art world introversion typical of minimalism and high conceptualism, and the more contextualised form of conceptualism that emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s. This contextualisation ranged from the cynical, streetwise sensationalism of the Young British Artists to various forms of social and political engagement.

Undoubtedly, the fact that he was gay and lived in the age of AIDS influenced Gonzalez-Torres's artistic development. But, to borrow a sentiment from Edmund White, it's not enough to be gay, you have to do interesting work as well. And Gonzales-Torres did interesting work; he was an artist engage with the formal discipline of a minimalist.

On one level, a wall of light has to be an optimistic statement, and this positive interpretation is supported by a photographic image of a bird in flight, displayed on billboards in six Dublin locations as part of the exhibition (from January 10th to February 6th). Here the association is clear: flight, freedom, even happiness. But the light bulbs plunging into the earth can as easily be read as a metaphor for death. The idea of a network, encapsulated in the wired grid of bulbs, recurs throughout the exhibition, in comparably sinister form.

Several pieces use fragmentary, blurred photographs of an anonymous crowd of people. It's not clear what occasion has brought them together. We just glimpse a mass of humanity.

When the image is repeated, in a circular format, on a series of plates, it suggests not so much food as microscopic organisms cultured on petri dishes. Rather than these crowds representing communality, there could be a suggestion that humankind is itself like a disease - an extreme view, but one bolstered by the pattern that emerges throughout the show.

Visitors are invited to take copies from several stacks of printed sheets, all of which are specifically political in their import, including the blank, black-edged requiem, Republican Years. As a democratic gesture towards audience involvement, this falls short of artistic generosity. One can't help feeling that Gonzalez-Torres, a minimalist at heart, is rather reluctantly embracing anecdotal content.

Like many Douglas Hyde shows, this one is more concerned with creating a reflective space for its audience than with providing a spectacle. Of course, many people prefer spectacle, and the one-for-everyone-in-the-audience element doesn't really work (apart from anything else, the pieces have dated very quickly), but the light sculpture is well worth seeing.

Fionnuala Ni Chiosain has, over several exhibitions, devised and refined a distinctive way of making images. There's a methodical severity to her practice of laying down and washing away forms and colours, so that the final work is a kind of hardwon residue. The forms are usually a few simple gestures, the colours water-based acrylic and black watercolour inks. Gradually her pictures have become more overtly beautiful, and that is true of some of the work in her latest Kerlin Gallery show. But in a way this show is also a corrective to that tendency.

Sean Scully has stripes and grids, and Ni Chosain has used comparable if less categorically defined patterns of surface division in making her paintings (with a nod towards bar codes, for example), but now she has chosen to anchor her images more specifically to the observed world. Not only are her new paintings inspired by photomicrographs of plant tissue, they are accompanied by literal photomicrographs of plant tissue in the form of her own colour prints. Inevitably, some of the paintings invite comparison with the work of Mark Francis, who explicitly evokes the photographic representation of microscopic organisms.

Both artists seek to embrace an expanded field of visual experience. Yet the marriage of art and science doesn't really happen here. The photographs suggest incidental correspondences with some of the paintings, but are not that strong or compelling in themselves. Overall it is a transitional show, with Ni Chiosain testing possibilities, drawn alternately towards process-based imagery and images based on natural processes.

Paper Works, at the National Photographic Archive, provides a welcome opportunity to see a lively cross-section of work on paper by contemporary Irish artists, North and South, selected from the pieces purchased by the Office of Public Works (OPW) under the Per Cent for Art scheme and, in the North, by the Department of the Environment. The latter are accurately described as "a working collection" in that the constituent pieces are usually distributed throughout the offices and public spaces of Government buildings. Equally, the OPW pieces are part of a working collection, but, because they are purchased in relation to specific architectural developments, each work has a specific home.

The business of administrating such collections is fraught with difficulties. Cautious experimentalism is the ideal, with bland, usually landscape-based work as the default option. But landscape needn't be bland, and there are fine, stirring examples from Jennifer Kingston, Mary Lohan, Catherine Thompson and Frank Eyre, who paints the contemporary, changing cityscape. David Crone, Andrew Butler and Anna McLeod show striking figurative work, and Catherine Harper's study makes a powerful impression.